NeoLoad assists you in building quality Web applications that offer high performance and scalability and that are far more likely to be used and appreciated than applications that are buggy and slow. However, building even the best software still requires that your application be tested under heavy loads (regardless of the specific goals you are pursuing for your application - load tests or stress tests). A heavy load is generally considered as simulating more than 1,000 users.

The following sections cover the best practices and recommendations for simulating heavy loads on the application being load tested. Heavy load testing means that you will be putting stress on your testing environment, so the load level attainable depends on how capable and how well tuned your testing environment is. Obviously, the testing environment includes NeoLoad, but it also includes network and other resources such as memory and CPU. The better your testing environment and tools are optimized, the heavier the load you will be able to simulate.

Most importantly, keep in mind that testing your application under a heavy load only makes sense if all basic scenarios are effective and your application works under a "normal" load, or at least a light load.

The main tuning and configuration points involved in improving your testing environment's capacity are divided into the four following topics: NeoLoad scenarios, NeoLoad load generators, the NeoLoad controller and finally the network.

The first two sections (NeoLoad scenarios and NeoLoad load generators) include best practices and guidance that mostly refer to elements of NeoLoad's internal configuration. The latter two on the other hand, pertain more to environment elements.